A River Runs Through It?

Rio L.A.: Tales From The Los Angeles River
Patt Morrison
Angel City Press

Chris Chandler
Special to the Mirror

   Like many LA immigrants, I’ve always been a bit confused about the LA River. It took several months for me to realize that the elaborate storm drain I drove by every day on the way to work in Glendale was actually a part of the river. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 15 years now and I’ve still only really seen the river from an airplane or on the news when the floods run. I suspect I’m not alone. For this reason, Rio L.A. Tales from the Los Angeles River is the perfect gift for an Angeleno, whether native, immigrant or émigré. The slim coffee table book is packed with beautiful pictures by local artist/photographer Mark Lamonica that surround a politically powerful and extremely witty history lesson by local journalist Patt Morrison.
   From its official, if artificial, unmarked starting spot behind the Canoga Park High School playing field to its end near the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere, Lamonica’s photographs, aided by Amy Inouye’s gorgeous layout (that allows the text to meander through the book in the same way the river used to meander through the city) reveal a river as multi-faceted as the rest of Los Angeles. Behind the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, for example, the river is like a mini-moat, it’s concrete expanse as daunting as the DMZ around a labor camp, while the wildlife preserve on the Sepulveda Dam reminds us why Kit Carson once called Los Angeles “truly a paradise on earth.  There are also some terrific shots of the dozen incredible bridges – every one on the national register of historic places – built by Merrill Butler, a man with a high school education who studied engineering through a correspondence course. Since the bridges were designed to showcase Los Angeles to passengers arriving by train, this book provides the best look most auto-bound Angelino’s are likely to get.
   Morrison’s secret history tells us that before becoming a concrete-lined storm drain, the Los Angeles River was the foundation of life in Los Angeles. When the Spaniards arrived, the basin supported a landscape “more like England than contemporary Southern California,” with “immense stands of sycamore and cottonwood and oak and alder.” The largest native village was called Yangna; its exact location has been lost “in part because it was a movable village according to the seasons, and also because fifty years after the Spanish arrived, no one troubled himself overmuch about the Indians.”
   The river supported both agriculture and industry, and was a central element in the day-to-day lives of the early “civilized” inhabitants, who washed clothes, bathed, swam in countless spots along its banks. Now, seventy years after the Army Corps of Engineers declared and won their war on the river, it is most often seen (in the literal sense) through the gaps in freeway soundproofing walls, a persistent yet tantalizing flash of graffiti and concrete fifty-one miles around the waist of Los Angeles like a giant leather belt.
   If the Spainard’s mission was to “civilize,” the Yankee’s was to make money. Soon after wresting California from the “white and brown” Californios in 1847, the Yankees put the river to work, powering flour and woolen mills and even the presses of the Los Angeles Times. But the river, which then as now could completely dry up, was not so amenable to being tamed.
   The middle chapters of the book detail an almost stereotypical litany of the big dreams of the Southern California entrepreneur, and the ways many of them were destroyed by the river’s infrequent yet biblical-sized floods. As just one example, Morrison calls the flood of 1914 “sheer revenge” from a river made obsolete by the opening of the Owens aqueduct in December 1913. The raging waters, accelerated by the quirk of geography that drops the river 800 feet over its 51 miles (the same drop the mighty Mississippi takes 2,000 miles to complete!), tumbled steel bridges and factories, submerged most of what is now Watts and Compton and drowned thousands upon thousands of birds in what had been the “world’s largest pigeon farm” on the banks of the river in Elysium Park.
   In 1935, the Army Corps of Engineers began its massive project to tame the river, and eventually declared the job done, having created “four hundred seventy miles of open channels, twenty-four hundred miles of covered storm drains and ninety-eight curbside openings into those storm drains, 123 debris basins, three reservoirs, several large dams and hundreds of crib dams and catchment inlets with a score or more pumping stations.” As the Los Angeles Times had it, the river had been “strapped to a laboratory table.”
   The River has since lived the life of an outsider, an imaginary landscape that has become the backdrop for giant radioactive ants in 1951’s THEM and countless adolescent drag racing fantasy sequences. But perhaps all that began to change with a poorly reviewed bit of performance art by Lewis MacAdams in 1985. The show, which the Los Angeles Times compared unfavorably to a high-school social studies project began what MacAdams has called a “forty year artwork to bring the Los Angeles River back to life through a combination of art, politics and magic” and led to the formation of the Friends of the Los Angeles River.
   Rediscovered by artists and community groups along its entire length, the River, underneath all that graffitied concrete, represents an incredible opportunity to create green, open spaces in a city known now for freeway congestion and smog. As Morrison says, it can never be the “real, sometimes too-real, river it once was” but it can, and should become something much more than what it is now.